Creating additional alert subscription for individual alerts

As discussed in earlier sections of this lab, AWS Cost Anomaly Detection helps users prevent unexpected charges for their AWS accounts. It is achieved by:

  • Anomaly detection using Machine Learning models
  • Alerting users via subscriptions Alert subscriptions are critical as it is a mechanism to notify users of detected anomalies proactively. Weekly or daily summary reports may not be the right choice in situations where users need to react quickly to a notification. Therefore, an option is to configure an alert subscription to notify users of each anomaly.

This section guides you on how to create an additional alert subscription with Individual alert mechanism and attach it to the existing cost monitor.

  1. To create a new alert subscription, go to Cost Anomaly Detection Overview page and select Alert subscriptions tab. Then click Create a subscription: Images/CostAnomaly17.png

  2. On the Create a subscription page, enter a subscription name and the select Individual alerts from Alerting frequency drop-down menu. If there is an existing SNS topic, enter the ARN in the Enter an Amazon SNS ARN: Images/CostAnomaly18.png

  3. If no SNS topic is available, search for Amazon SNS in AWS console to create a new one. Select Topics from the left navigation menu in Amazon SNS and click Create topic button. Images/CostAnomaly19.png

  4. On the Create topic page, FIFO (first-in, first-out) SNS type is selected by default. FIFO topics are helpful for use cases where message order needs to be preserved. For further details, refer to FIFO topics use case. For this lab, select Standard SNS type and enter a name. Keep all other options as default and click Create topic: Images/CostAnomaly20.png

  5. Create a subscription once the SNS topic is successfully created. Under the Subscriptions tab, click Create Subscription: Images/CostAnomaly21.png

  6. On the Create Subscription page, select Email under the Protocol drop-down menu and enter an email address in the text field under Endpoint. Then click Create Subscription at the bottom of the page to finish creating subscription: Images/CostAnomaly22.png

At times, there is a requirement to alert multiple individuals or multiple teams such as FinOps, DevOps, SRE or Management team. In such a scenario, additional subscriptions can be created.

To send notifications, you must accept the subscription to the Amazon SNS notification topic.

  1. Take a note of Amazon SNS ARN: Images/CostAnomaly22-ARN.png

Amazon SNS ARN is required to complete the rest of steps.

  1. Now go back to the Create a subscription page where you left off at step 2 in Cost Anomaly Detection and enter SNS ARN you recorded: Images/CostAnomaly23.png

  2. Next, select a Threshold type and enter the threshold value. For example, we have selected an absolute threshold and set the value to 100. Under Cost monitors, select your pre-existing cost monitor and then click Create subscription. Images/CostAnomaly24.png

While setting threshold value, customers must consider their individual use case and risk appetite.

  1. Alert subscription details page shows that the subscription is successfully created with Individual alerts frequency. Images/CostAnomaly25.png

  2. Users also have the option to cost anomaly alerts in a Slack channel or an Amazon Chime chat room. For the details, refer to Receiving AWS Cost Anomaly Detection alerts in Amazon Chime and Slack

Congratulations!

You have completed this section of the lab. In this section, you successfully created an alert subscription which leverages Amazon Simple Notification Service(SNS) to notify the subscribers every time an anomaly is detected.

Click on Next Step to continue to the next section.